


good for you

by singsongsung



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2018-12-26 06:47:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12053538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: "She can see so many fissures. Fissures in Fred Andrews’ body, fissures in this town along an east-west line, fissures in the friendship she and Jughead and Archie have shared since the sandbox, fractures appearing in the form of leather jackets and bullets from a handgun.It terrifies her to think that they could be the next thing to split wide open."Betty and Jughead carve out their middle ground.





	1. her

**Author's Note:**

> Post-s1.
> 
> This fic is inspired partially by a conversation I had with raptorlily about potential season 2 storylines, and partially by the Selena Gomez song of the same name (it came on a Spotify playlist and hit me over the head with feelings, okay?). 
> 
> The epigraphs in all three chapters are from "Good For You" as well.

_gonna wear that dress you like, skin-tight_  
_do my hair up real, real nice_  
_and syncopate my skin to your heart beating_  
_’cause I just wanna look good for you, good for you_  
_I just wanna look good for you, good for you_

 

 

 

Betty’s always been a nice girl, but never much of a cool one.

She may have her moments of doubt, but overall, she knows herself. She knows who she is. As a kid, she didn’t have much of a princess phase, spending her time devouring Cam Jansen and later Nancy Drew novels instead. She liked when it snowed so that they could stay inside during recess and play cards rather than watching the other girls in her class shriek as boys chased them across the playground. She was fiercely loyal to Archie, even when other girls said he had cooties, and to Jughead, even when Reggie taunted him with insults that grew only moderately more creative with age, and to Kevin, even when Cheryl kept calling her his ‘hag.’ She could never manage ‘cool’ when they got older, either, not when it came to boys - she couldn’t stay cool and unbothered around Archie before _or_ after confessing her feelings to him. It’s just not who she is, and that’s fine, because being a member of the cool crowd didn’t matter: Betty Cooper was generally liked, always kind, and sometimes even a little bit proud of her accomplishments.

And that’s enough for her, to be nice to others, to be true to her inner nerd, to be steadfast in her affections - or it _was_ enough for her, until Jughead closes the door of the trailer behind himself and turns to her with a plea in his eyes. The rain beats lightly against the trailer’s siding as he moves toward her, leather jacket around his shoulders, hair mussed up and uncovered, his hands reaching out tentatively. She can still hear the echoes of the words he spoke not long ago: _I love you, Betty Cooper. Love you, love you, love you._

Jughead takes her hands in his own and holds them with such care, like each and every one of the bones in her fingers is fragile. It’s like it was at Pop’s that night when they fought and made up and told each other their secrets, and she loves him for it, but it isn’t what she wants, not right now. She wants his hands firm and sure and warm on her body, making her melt. She wants happiness back. She wants certainty.

He offers explanations. He makes her promises. She can hear the way he’s rationalizing everything, perhaps just as much for himself as for her. There is something a little desperate about the tension in his jawline and it makes her chest ache like a fist is clenched around her heart. She loves him.

God, she loves him, so when he nudges his mouth against hers, a gesture that’s more question than kiss, she claims his lips with her own and presses herself against his body. She leaves her fingers intertwined with his so that she doesn’t have to touch the jacket.

Slowly, he walks her backward, to the couch, and lays her down. Her shirt comes up and over her head again, and she jerks her head downward in a quick nod, granting permission, when his thumb sweeps under the cup of her bra.

Heat coils low in her belly and burns behind her eyelids. His mouth against her skin is reverent and reckless all at once.

For him, she will be cool. She will feel leather under her palms and dig her fingers in harder than necessary.

She will be cool with this.

 

 

 

 

In a twist of fate, however, the next day finds her feeling decidedly _not_ cool, sitting in a hospital waiting room with one hand resting gently against Archie’s shoulder. Veronica sits on his other side, clasping his hand.

When the two of them are gone - in the frantic mess that is her mind, the knowledge of where they went seems to have disappeared - she turns to her boyfriend and finds his mouth drawn into a tight line.

“Juggie,” she whispers.

He puts his hand on her cheek and brushes his thumb over her skin. “S’okay, Betts,” he whispers back, but it isn’t, not really.

Betty can see so many fissures. Fissures in Fred Andrews’ body, the prayer running through her mind crackling with emotion,  _please please don’t let him die;_  fissures in this town along an east-west line; fissures in the friendship she and Jughead and Archie have shared since the sandbox (or the backyard treehouse, more accurately), fractures appearing in the form of leather jackets and bullets from a handgun.

It terrifies her to think that they could be the next thing to split wide open.

 

 

 

 

By unspoken agreement, they do not tell Archie and Veronica about the Serpents. Betty bakes snickerdoodles for Archie and goes over to the Pembrooke and sits on a silken bedspread while Veronica confesses her fears in the quietest voice, and she says nothing, not to her oldest best friend, not to her newest, about _I love you_ or the sound Jughead had drawn out of her mouth with his fingers twisting around one of her nipples or the leather jacket he now shrugs on like a second skin or the way she wakes up in the mornings lately, with her heart pounding in her throat and her eyes open wide and something like dread in the pit of her belly.

Betty is her mother’s daughter and she maintains her poise. She doesn’t panic, not in public; she keeps her smiles placid and resists the urge to dig her fingernails into her palms. At night, sometimes, she sinks her fingertips into her thighs instead, washes the cuts in the next morning’s shower.

 

 

 

 

“I don’t know how to talk to you about it,” Jughead says softly on a November evening. The rain falling from the sky is crystallizing, almost but not quite snow. Betty is standing in Sunnyside trailer park with the faux-fur-trimmed hood of her coat pulled on over her head, boots squelching in dirt, feeling out of place and nauseous as she tries to understand what she just witnessed: her boyfriend getting off the back of a motorcycle, its driver’s face obscured by a helmet, the locks of hair tumbling out from under it and onto her shoulders shining pink-red in the streetlights.

“You can talk to me about anything,” she says, proud of the way her voice does not tremble. “Just like I talk to you. I told you about Polly and the ridiculous maple syrup feud and about - ” Shoved into her pockets, her hands ball into fists.

He kisses her there in the shadows and her heart thrums with memory. _I believe_ you. _I love_ you.

“It just isn’t… you. The Serpents. South Side High. It’s all the polar opposite of Betty Cooper.” He fingers the fur along the rim of her hood. “Never the twain shall meet.”

She shakes her head, feeling her chin take on a stubborn shape. “They’ve already met. In you and me.”

A car drives by, its headlights illuminating his face briefly, and she doesn’t like the things she sees in his eyes. There is a sort of adoration there that she’s accustomed to, and it’s not what she wants. She wants his hands rough on her body, wants to be slammed against cupboards again. She doesn’t need a protector; she is not some dainty thing to be placed upon a shelf.

She steps close to him, so that their bodies fit together, one of her legs between his. She puts her hands on his cheeks and kisses him softly, so softly, until she abruptly digs her teeth into his bottom lip. He groans and grabs her hips, pulling her closer still as he whispers quiet curses, and she winds her arms around his neck, her grasp gaining tightness steadily, a constriction.

“I want to be the girl on a bike with you,” she whispers, and even in the darkness she can see the flicker of his expression, the way it changes.

 

 

 

 

He should be with his foster family and she should be at home, both of them warm and cozy and studiously bent over textbooks, but instead they’re in the cab of his father’s truck, tugging impatiently at each other’s clothes. They can’t turn on the truck because Jughead’s gas budget is nearly nonexistent, so they warm each other as best as they can with their hands, Betty’s teeth chattering lightly under he settles his body over hers and kisses her hard.

For the first time, that night, she takes him in her mouth, and Jughead winds his fingers in her hair and breathes her name like a benediction. She swallows when he comes and when she straightens up she pokes her tongue into her cheeks and slides it along her teeth, intrigued by the way he tastes. She’s grateful to see that he’s looking at her the way he used to, affection sprinkled with hints of hunger, garnished with something so achingly sweet that looking at him is sometimes as satisfying of pulling the cherry from a Pop’s milkshake off its stem with her teeth.

Still breathing hard, he says, “I love you, Betty,” and she smiles at him even as she begins to shiver once again, says, “I love you, too.”

 

 

 

 

Betty borrows a dress from Veronica and accompanies her boyfriend to the Whyte Wyrm.

She leaves her home in jeans and a pink button-down shirt, and her mother says, “Be careful with that boy, Elizabeth,” which is different than what she might have said months ago, gentler. Alice Cooper is looking at her daughter but her eyes are off somewhere else.

She meets Jughead at the trailer and changes there, wiggling into a short black dress and trading her sneakers for a pair of heeled booties and blending dark eyeshadows together. She puts on red lipstick and rubs her lips together carefully to even out the colour.

Jughead raises his eyebrows when he sees her, but Betty raises her own right back. Maybe he thinks she doesn’t look like herself, but he looks different, too. The jacket he wears has a certain weight; it seems to tie him to the ground, for better or worse. He’s wearing his beanie far less often, these days, forgot to put it on once when he came to see her at lunch time and muttered something about not being a kid anymore when Archie asked questions.

He rests his hand on her hip and skims it upward, knuckles brushing lightly over the swell of her breast. “This is nice,” he murmurs, and he might mean her dress or her body.

“Let’s go,” she says, but she lingers close for one last moment.

 

 

 

 

At the bar, she does her very best not to stare at the snakes in tanks or at the inked designs on men’s arms and chests and necks. She holds Jughead’s hand and does her best to make small talk with some of his friends from South Side High, including the girl who dropped him off at Sunnyside once, the one with pink in her hair.

“You look like Brittany Murphy,” says the pink-haired girl, whose name is Toni, “especially now that you’re not wearing a cardigan.”

Betty flushes, a glass of something she’s not old enough to legally drink clutched in her hand - Jughead says things have been unstructured lately, with the Serpents, with his father in jail and unrest growing thanks to the derision emanating from the north side of town. Rules are being bent and broken. “Thanks?” she says. It comes out like a question, her voice lifting at the end.

Toni laughs and opens her mouth, but then snaps it closed abruptly. An older woman with tousled blonde hair has appeared, her eyes narrowed beneath thick black liner. “Let me talk to little miss Elm Street,” she says, and Toni vanishes.

Betty looks up at the woman, who does not introduce herself.

“You wrote that piece about us in your school paper.”

Betty nods.

“You’re trying to do a good thing,” the woman says. “It was a good thing - the things you wrote, they were true. But we’re not your charity case.”

“I know,” Betty says quickly. “I don’t think that.”

The woman plucks the glass Betty’s holding out of her hand and sets it on the bar. “But you think a lot of things, don’t you? You think you love that kid of FP’s. You think you can take your clothes off and save him, fuck him right out of poverty.” At Betty’s muted gasp, she smirks, but there’s no mirth in it. “You think you have a right to want things from the world. You think life should be fair. Think you can put on a slutty dress and slum it until the thrill wears off, and sure, you can. But that kid - ” She jerks her head toward Jughead, who’s got his head bent in serious conversation with a couple older men, both bearded and grizzled. “He can’t. You’re only going to make it worse. Only going to become a cautionary tale. Look at that sweet little blonde thing from the big house on Elm, thought the Serpents were good but look what that boy did to her. Fucked her up. Broke her heart.”

“I don’t - ” Betty begins, but she doesn’t even know how to continue. “I wouldn’t - ”

“Oh, baby,” the woman says, and the term of endearment sounds like an insult. “I know who your mother is. I know _exactly_ what you would do.”

She leaves and Betty stays frozen in place, blinking hard like that will erase her shock, her confusion, like it will make the bar stop spinning, but it doesn’t. In the end, she has no choice but to ground herself by drawing blood from her palms.

 

 

 

 

Later, Jughead says, “Don’t listen to Leah,” and slips his jacket around her shoulders. She’s cold and tired and still a little bit stunned, so she doesn’t protest, just slides her arms into the sleeves. The material is worn and surprisingly soft - just like the boy who wears it.

“Juggie, I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, leaning back against the side of his father’s truck, snowflakes catching in her hair. Christmas is coming soon; she thinks of the gift she got him, wrapped carefully and hidden beneath her bed.

He leans into her, his fingertips brushing over her bare legs, where gooseflesh is rising. With the truck at her back and the warmth of his breath on her cheeks, she feels both safe and strangely electrified. He says, “You could never hurt me, sweetheart.”

Betty kisses him. She does it because she loves him, because he’s never called her that before and her heart is fluttering in a wonderful way, and because her mind goes pleasantly blank when they kiss, static overpowering everything else.

“That’s a lie,” she wants to say, and she almost does; the words seem to make their way out of her throat and dance along her tongue and maybe even into his mouth, but they never emerge audibly.

She can hurt him and he can hurt her: that is the truth of love. She knows it as sharply as she feels the cuffs of the leather jacket brushing against her palms, stinging her fresh cuts so gently it almost feels like a caress.

 

 

 

 

When she takes off Veronica’s dress and her makeup, she feels real again, as though the girl in that dress was a character, a role she was acting out. She wonders if Leah was right, if all that she’s doing is playing dress-up or dress-down. Does her real self belong on the north side, in a pink bedroom with an impeccably organized closet and her parents’ hopes and dreams resting steadily on her shoulders?

“Love you,” she tells Jughead when he drops her off at home. He thumbs her bottom lip and kisses her chastely, so unlike the way he did outside the bar.

In her perfect bedroom, under perfect white sheets made up with perfect hospital corners each morning, Betty cries salty tears into her damaged hands.

 

 

 

 

The holiday break is momentarily blissful. When neither of them are in school, there are no lines drawn in the sand, no stark divisions in their days. Jughead often sleeps at Archie’s and in some fleeting instants of time, it’s like nothing at all has changed. Betty goes to her window at night in shorts and a sleep shirt, no bra, and wiggles her fingers in a wave goodnight. The way he looks at her before she closes her curtains stays with her in her dreams.

When it snows, Jughead wears his beanie. Once, when they’re leaving a movie and big, wet flakes are drifting down around them, he takes it off his head and puts it on hers. They drive out to the river and fool around in his truck, and when they’re both breathless and her thighs are still trembling from the way he’d worked his hand between her legs, she slouches against him and lays her head on the bare skin exposed by his open flannel shirt, listens to the slow and peaceful tune of his heart.

On the way back to her house she turns on the radio and they listen to carols. Betty wants to feel calm. She tries to feel bright. 

 

 

 

 

They exhange gifts on Christmas Eve. She gives him a copy of _The New York Trilogy_ ; he gives her pretty pair of jade-coloured earrings.

“They’re not, uh, fancy,” he says, brow furrowed as he awaits her reaction. “I couldn’t affo - ”

Betty cuts off his sentence with a brief but firm kiss. “I love them, Jug. Thank you.”

He looks a bit flustered, which strikes her as adorable, given the fact that there’s a leather jacket with a gang’s insignia emblazoned on its back in the truck parked outside of her cookie-cutter home. “They reminded me of your eyes,” he murmurs, but as she looks at them in their small box, they make her think of the piercing gaze of a snake.

 

 

 

 

Veronica and Archie beg and plead and pester until Betty says she’ll attend Reggie’s New Year’s party. Jughead never quite agrees to the plan, but they all know he’ll go where she does.

She borrows the short black dress again and wears it over a pair of black tights patterned with flowers in alternating sections of sheer and opaque fabric. She does the best smoky makeup she can manage and puts on her new earrings, leaves her hair down in the messy waves it dried in after her shower.

“You look incredible,” Jughead murmurs into her neck later. He’s had one red solo cup of beer from the keg, and while he’s not drunk, he is a little bolder in the way he touches her. She likes it, leans into it, shifts her hips toward his.

“You don’t look so bad yourself,” she teases, and then they’re kissing in Reggie Mantle’s kitchen, and good girl Betty Cooper doesn’t even care.

Veronica interrupts them with a wolf whistle and then hooks her arm through Betty’s and tugs her away, demanding girl time. She wants to know about the sex. Betty tells her, truthfully, that it hasn’t happened yet, not in the way she means. They’ve done basically everything else, hands and mouths and desperation, hearts always pounding when they pull apart.

“Well, you can cut the tension with a knife,” Veronica says. “When you finally do it, it’s going to be crazy good.”

“V!” Betty says, and for a second she is scanadalized, for a second she is uncool, for a second she is some previous version of herself - and for a second she is comfortable in it.

“We should go find the boys,” she says, and steers them both back into the fray.

 

 

 

 

They do not find the boys, and they end up separated from one another. The Mantle house is large, but it’s full of nearly every student from Riverdale High, and the crowd only increases in density as they close in on midnight. Betty finds a spot on the wall to lean against and has just taken out her phone to send a group text to the effect of _where are you??_ when some guy she vaguely recognizes from the halls of their school leans over her.

“Hey!” he yells by her ear. “Can I buy from you?”

She blinks at him. “I’m sorry?”

He shows her a few bills, leaning even closer. “I’m good for the cash.” There’s a beat of silence, during which the extent of her confusion must show on her face, becaus he suddenly doubts himself. “You’re… Betty, right? You’re a Serpent?”

“I’m - ” She tightens her hold on her phone. “I’m not - my boyfriend - ”

“C’mon,” the guy says, offering her a cajoling smile. “I’ve got to ring in the new year the right way, you know?”

Finally finding her voice, she says, “I don’t sell drugs,” and pushes past him, steps in front of several people in line for the bathroom, and locks the door behind her.

She stares at herself in the mirror, barely registering the sound of annoyed partygoers knocking on the door, and watches her chest lift and fall quickly as she breathes. She tries to focus, tries to study herself. Does she _look_ like a drug dealer?

She examines her eyeshadow, her lipstick, the frown in her eyes. She takes in her black dress, its sharp contrast against her winter-pale skin. She just looks like a girl, not like a drug dealer, but above all else, she does not look like herself.

Betty hugs herself, holding onto her upper arms, resisting the urge to let her nails pierce her skin. For the first time in a long time, perhaps for the first time ever, she longs for her soft white cardigan.

 

 

 

 

She finds Jughead, grabs his arm, says, “I need to go home,” into his ear, and heads for the front door.

He follows her out, a crease between his brows. “Betts, wait - ”

“I need to go home,” she repeats, trying not to sound frantic. “I just need to - ”

“What happened?” he asks, reaching for her.

“Some guy just tried to buy drugs from me.”

Jughead frowns deeply. “ _What?_ ”

“He assumed I was a Serpent and assumed that meant I was selling drugs.”

He sighs heavily. “Betty, I’m so sorry - ”

“No.” She presses a hand to his chest. “No, it’s not your fault. It’s me, it’s - this isn’t me, I’m not… ” She shakes her head slightly. “I just need to go home. I need to take off this dress.”

Something terrible flickers through his eyes, perhaps fear, perhaps hurt. “Betts,” he says, his voice low and serious.

She shakes her head, her hair brushing against her cheeks. This is not it. This is not their fissure. The tears in her eyes have nothing to do with the tremors she can feel beneath her ribs. “I just have to take it off, Jug. That’s all.”

He opens his mouth, but she shakes her head again. She loves him, and the look on his face is torturous, but she needs to take off this dress and this makeup and the coolness she’s been wearing like a mask over all her uncertainty. She needs to see herself again.

She wants to say that she loves him but her throat is too tight for words. The way he shoves his hands roughly into his pockets makes her suspect her feels the same.

Betty walks backward away from him, away from the house, her steps careful over slick pavement. She doesn’t know why she can’t bring herself to look away from him, from his sad blue eyes. This moment doesn’t matter. This is not their ruin, it’s not.

 _It’s not, it’s not, it’s not_ , she thinks all through her cab ride home, all through the shower during which her makeup runs black down the drain, all through the hour she spends in bed longing for sleep with her eyes squeezed shut against the world. _It’s not._

 

 

 

 

Early in the morning, when they sky is still dark, the sound of knuckles rapping against her windowpane draws her from sleep.

When she sits up in bed, sleepy-eyed and disoriented, she spots a familiar beanie outside her window.

 

 

 

tbc.


	2. him

_hold up, take a minute, love_  
_’cause I ain’t trying to mess your image up_  
_I ain’t trying to mess your fitness up_  
_and I ain’t trying to get you into stuff_

 

 

Jughead steals a ladder from the Andrews’ unlocked shed and props it against the side of the Cooper house, climbs his way to Betty’s window and knocks as loudly as he dares like some misguided Shakespearean hero. It’s the very beginning of the very first day of a brand new year and Riverdale is so quiet, so peaceful. In these hours, in this moment, it’s just an ordinary New England town, sleepy and unassuming, and Jughead is just a boy, but the girl who appears behind the window with her blonde hair tousled and sadness around her eyes isn’t _just_ anything.

He’s been thinking about her since she walked away from him in the Mantles’ ridiculously long driveway, eyes wet and shoulders shaky. He wanted to follow her, wanted to wash away every layer of the midnight-black mascara on her lashes himself, wanted to peel the thin straps of her dress down her arms, but Archie and Veronica had arrived then, concern creased on both their faces, and when he’d declared his intention to go after her Archie had said, “If she wants space you should maybe just give it to her,” which is perhaps the wisest sentence he’s ever uttered in his sixteen years, and after Jughead joined Veronica in staring at Archie in surprise for a moment, he began to feel like something heavy was ramming itself repeatedly against his chest, because Archie, for all his faults, is _Archie_ , and it was only so many weeks ago that his father was shot, only so many months ago that Jughead told him they were brothers.

Everything has changed of late, and so much of it stings that he hardly even notices anymore, life evening out into a dull but persistent ache. Part of him feels right with the leather jacket on his shoulders, part of him feels wrong. He feels uncomfortable around Archie, the person he was once most comfortable with. Even at South Side High, where he fits in much better than he ever did at the north side school, even in his foster home, where he’s fed well and kept warm, he feels a little twitchy; there is a certain tension in knowing that life could have been like this for him, but wasn’t. And watching Betty and all her efforts, all her determination, all of her beliefs and all of the confidence she seems to demand from herself - it makes something inside him burn in the strangest way, because sometimes it’s all he wants, for her to be like that, to be different, to be _with_ him, but that’s not who she is, and he understands that.

He understands, he really does, because he fell in love with Betty Cooper, and the girl he fell in love with was not at her most comfortable in black dresses with hems that reached the tops of her thighs or in a rundown bar full of encaged snakes. He fell in love with a girl who was everything her perky ponytail conveyed and everything but all at once; with a girl who wears white lacy bralettes even beneath dark clothes, their fabric unbearably delicate and feminine; with a girl who is singlehandedly holding together Riverdale High’s student newspaper in his absence.

He doesn’t want a false version of her, doesn’t want a masquerade, not when she so often feels like the only true thing he’s ever known.

 

 

 

Betty invites him in from the cold and into her bed. Beneath her soft sheets, he slides an arm around her waist and her leg hooks over his, the thin cotton of her pyjama pants against the rough denim of his jeans. They lay their heads on the same pillow, noses nearly touching.

“You’re wearing your beanie,” she whispers.

He looks at her mouth; her lips are still faintly stained from her dark lipstick. “I never wanted to change you, Betts,” he whispers back. “I never wanted you to change at all. I love you. _You_. The way you are.”

Her teeth slip into her bottom lip with enough pressure to turn it white. “But you’re changing,” she says. “If you change and I don’t, I - I don’t know where that leaves us.”

“It leaves us here,” he says, tightening his grip on her. “I’m still me, even if I go to school on the south side and… ”

“And there’s a gang expecting you to step into your father’s shoes.”

Jughead sighs and closes his eyes. This is the place they had their very first kiss, and every time he’s back here, in her bedroom, he can’t help but be swept up in the memory of it, in her soft and curious eyes, in the racing of his heart. It wasn’t long ago, not at all, but it feels like they were so much younger then when she resurfaces in his mind in her pure-as-snow white sweater, when he thinks of himself with his beanie securely on his head and nerves crackling through his voice; after they kissed, even after her sudden epiphany, her urgent words, the tips of her ears were pink and he’d thought, following her down the stairs and out of the house, _I did that; I did that to Betty Cooper._

“The only shoes I’m wearing are my own,” he tells her firmly, and he means for it to be a promise, but the smile she gives him is melancholy, as though she understands that those words are nothing but wisps, stretching toward her with the best intentions, winding around her limbs soothingly now, easily, but unsustainable outside of their blanket cocoon.

“Your boots leak whenever it rains, Jug,” she says, and he grins at her and peppers kisses across her cheeks, and though he hears a little sniffling sound, when he flicks his gaze up to hers, he finds her eyes are dry.

 

 

 

If he wants Betty to go back to being herself, to the girl she was, to the girl he loved, before there was a sharp knock on his door on a rainy evening and a gunshot rang through the town so loudly that sometimes, in quiet, windless moments, he’s sure he can still hear, still _feel_ its reverberations, it only seems fair that he try and do the same.

He wears his Serpents jacket as little as possible, ditching it in the passenger seat of his car in the parking lot at Pop’s. He shrugs into an old coat instead, corduroy, sherpa-lined, and tries very hard not to shift his shoulders too often, tells himself he does not miss the distinct weight of the leather jacket, reminds himself that the sensation he’s feeling, like he’s floating away, is only in his mind.

Betty waits for him in a booth, hands folded neatly atop the table. She’s wearing a pale blue blouse beneath a grey cardigan, and the light in her eyes when she spots him, the curl of pink lips - coated with nothing more than cherry chapstick - is downright fucking magical. He slides into the other side of the booth thinking that this is it; for once in his life, he’s actually managed to solve a problem rather than create one.

“I took the liberty of ordering for you,” she says. “Extra cheese on the burger, double serving of fries.”

He extends a hand across the table and weaves his fingers through hers, says, “Betty Cooper, you are an angel. Will you go steady with me?”

She giggles and he can’t help but revel in that sweet, sparkling sound; he can almost taste her laughter on his own tongue, balmy as warm apple cider on a winter day. “Oh, I just don’t know,” she teases, folds her forearms on the ever-somewhat-sticky table. It seems to him, as his eyes fall to her cleavage, that there is one more button than usual undone on her blouse. “I’ve heard some awfully bad things about you.”

He squeezes her fingers until her knuckles turn as white as his own. “If I didn’t have a burger coming… ”

Betty rolls her eyes and straightens in her seat, tugging her hand away. “Did you bring your homework?”

He did, and after they finish their dinner they stay at the booth, unloading textbooks from their backpacks. Betty lines coloured highlighters up next to her notebook and tightens her ponytail and in the fluorescent glow of the diner lights, he feels so very at peace. He doesn’t know what it says about him - his childhood, his psyche, his emotional stability - that he still feels so safe at Pop’s, even after what happened to Archie’s dad, but he does, especially now, especially watching her eyes flick over the diagrams in her Chem textbook.

She doesn’t say anything, but he knows that she senses him staring, because she turns as pink as her milkshake.

 

 

 

In his efforts to reform himself, to return to moody adolescence and spend less time walking in his father’s ill-fated footsteps, he invites Betty over to have dinner with his foster parents, Nancy and Craig, and their other foster son, Jeremy.

Betty wears a sweet little brown skirt and a sweater that looks like it’s from J. Crew and brings a cheesecake and Craig and Nancy, predictably, adore her. Betty never misses a beat in lighthearted conversation, compliments Nancy’s cooking, asks Jeremy about fifth grade, nods enthuasiastically along at Craig’s long-winded hunting stories, and keeps shooting him these warm, easy smiles. As the meal is wrapping up, she brushes her hand over his thigh under the table and he -

Once, he had a dream like this, Betty next to him at a dinner table, touching him simply, touching him casually, the way you touch someone you love. Once, this was all he wanted.

But now things are different, now too much has happened, now he is too profoundly fucked up to enjoy this, and as he sits there at that dinner table and watches his girlfriend make his foster mother laugh, he feels like his skin is crawling.

 

 

 

Toni blows a bubble with purple Hubba Bubba, lets it grow and grow until it bursts and smacks back against her lips. “Like, I get it, Jug,” she says. The cafeteria is loud around them, shoes clanging against the metal legs of chairs, voices ringing out. “She’s hot; I saw those little outfits she's been wearing. And I read that piece she wrote - she’s smart.”

Jughead lets his eyebrows ask his question: _but?_

“I’m not gonna pretend to know where she ends up,” Toni tells him with a shrug, “but I’ll tell you where she doesn’t: Sunnyside.”

He slouches back in his chair. There are still some chips in the bag in front of him, but strangely, they hold no appeal. “I don’t want to end up in Sunnyside either, so I don’t see how that’s a problem.”

“Come on, man,” Toni says. She blows another bubble. There’s something in her eyes that he doesn’t want to see. “There’s a difference between not ending up somewhere and not _wanting_ to.”

 

 

 

“I love you,” Betty whispers to him in the silence and the darkness of his father’s trailer, little gasps between her words. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knows that the fact that the electricity it still working in the trailer in the midst of winter, months after his father went to prison, is thanks to the Serpents - but he doesn’t want to think about that, doesn’t want to think about why, only wants to think about Betty next to him on the twin bed with the creaky mattress, her bare legs spread unselfconsciously wide, his hand in her red panties with a tiny red bow at the front, her fingers curled around the edge of the mattress and a furrow between her brows.

“I love you, too, sweetheart,” he tells her, his mouth against her temple, and Betty sighs, her hips arching upward into his touch.

“Oh, Juggie, _please_ ,” she breathes, and Jughead can make her come, can render her boneless and hazy-eyed, but there is a terrible flicker of a thought that nags at him even through his arousal. He’s not sure what, besides this, he can give her.

 

 

 

In the passenger seat of the truck, legs crossed neatly at the ankle, mittened hands clasped in her lap, Betty says, “You know, I’d go with you.”

He offers her the quickest glance, the briefest smile. “I know.”

He doesn’t know if he wants to visit his father in jail. Part of him feels like he should; part of him feels like he can’t.

 

 

 

Sometimes, he says goodbye to Betty in front of her picture-perfect suburban home, fingering the collar of her pink blouse or rubbing a thumb along the cuff of her soft sweater, which peeks out from beneath the sleeve of her jacket, and kisses her cherry-chapstick lips chastely, in case her parents are watching, gives her fingers one soft squeeze and basks, momentarily, in the smitten smile she throws over her shoulder on the way inside, and then he gets back in the truck and drives to the White Wyrm and when he steps out into the unforgiving cold in his leather jacket, his lungs feel like they can fully expand.

In lots of ways, he is not his father’s son, but the men in the bar, with their gruff laughter and stubbled cheeks, they know him by his blood, by the way he sometimes walks like FP, by their identical habit of slamming a fist against a surface when they’re amused, and on that basis alone, they accept him.

It’s never been something he really wanted or fought for, acceptance, inclusion, but to just have it bestowed upon him, no questions asked, not a single judgemental look, no wrinkled noses or quiet scoffs - it’s nice. It’s easy.

It fits like a leather jacket on a cold day, held closed across his chest as he makes his way through the parking lot.

 

 

 

Betty rarely comes with him to the bar in the new year. He’s often there past her curfew, and he imagines her snuggled up in bed with a Victorian novel (nice long reads for winter, she says) when he receives her texts. Sometimes she sends _goodnight <3_ long before he’s even thought of leaving, when clouds are passing across the moon, plunging the whole town into complete darkness, if only for a moment.

When she does come with him again, on an evening after a double-dinner-date with Archie and Veronica at Pop’s, she’s in a bright mood, flirtatious, her arm wrapped around his, hand on his bicep. They haven’t discussed sex recently, not actual, penetrative sex; Betty’s been shy on that subject even when she’s not shy at all with her hands and her tongue, and he doesn’t know if it’s because she seems to come from a line of easily impregnable women, or if it’s for another reason, a more vulnerable one, but he suspects, now, that sex might be the direction the evening is heading in. She keeps looking at him with fluttery lashes, and she wants to get a drink.

 

 

 

In the midst of snake tanks and scarred wood, Betty sticks out, for lack of a better simile, like a sore thumb. Her blue dress and navy cardigan make for a distinct spot of colour against all the dull shades of grey and brown and green, and her face, particularly without the dark eyeliner she used to wear when they came here, is distinctly unblemished, unlined.

They sit at the bar and drink vodka sodas. She crosses her legs and her dress rides up on her thighs and he puts his hand on her knee and doesn’t know what it means, if it says _mine_ or _you’re safe_ or _I want you_ , and Betty, being Betty, even in the midst of what appears to be her grand seduction plan, starts talking earnestly about his father, about how he should really think about visiting, and Jughead shakes his head, squeezes her knee, but they’re interrupted by Tim, one of the older members of the Serpents, who’s leaning on the bar nearby.

“I agree, little lady,” he says in his deep, thunderous voice. “He should get out to visit FP.”

Betty blinks her pretty green eyes, the flutter of her lashes startled now rather than coy. They don’t have sex that night.

 

The Serpents accept him with no questions, but they do have requests.

Jughead finds himself with a folded piece of paper shoved into his jacket pocket, a heavy hand clapping down on his shoulder, __you pass that on to your old man_ _ ringing quietly in his right ear.

Two nights later in the Cooper rec room, arm slung around Betty’s shoulders as they watch Forrest Gump because it just happens to be on TV, Alice Cooper bursts into the room with that very piece of paper in hand.

“What on _earth_ is this?” she demands, slapping a hand against the light switch. The bulbs burn his pupils momentarily.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Betty asks. She’s already got that fire in her voice, even squinting from the sudden onslaught of light.

Alice does not look at her, only at him. “A message for your father, I presume?”

Betty gets to her feet slowly and demands, “Did you _go through Jughead’s things_?”

“Save me the judgement, Elizabeth; thank god that I did. Your boyfriend is in a gang, and he’s carrying information about _drug sales_ and who knows what else to his father in his _prison cell_.”

Betty looks at him, at her mother, and then seemingly at nothing at all before she manages to say. “Jughead’s not in a gang, Mom, he’s - ”

“Oh, Betty,” Alice breathes, dropping her arms to her sides. “Honey, please - please listen to me. You have to understand that there are some choices in this world that you can’t take back.”

“You’ve made that very clear to me, Mom,” Betty says sharply. “There’s no reason for you to snoop in Jughead’s things and make these crazy accusations. He would never - ”

“Betty,” he interrupts, standing too. It feels like the process of straightening up takes a long time, like his bones are weary. He yanks off his beanie and pushes his fingers through his hair and it’s so weird, how the sensation is freeing, almost relaxing, how he does not feel exposed. “It was in my pocket.”

She huffs, and it is adorable, and she is so righteous, so full of conviction, so beautiful in her stubborn, misplaced faith. “Jug, she had absolutely no right to - ”

“No, she didn’t, but…” He sighs heavily and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “It was in my pocket.”

Betty stares at him, stares and stares until he can see disappointment in the downturn of one corner of her mouth, until he sees uncertainty bleed into her assurance.

“I think it’s time for you to leave,” Alice says in a tone of command rather than of suggestion, and he looks at Betty for just a moment, regret a painful lump in his throat, beanie crumpled in one hand, before he heads for the stairs.

“Jughead,” she says immediately, her voice spiking with alarm, a breathless break between the syllables of his name.

“It’s okay,” he tells her, turning back toward her and giving her a steady nod. He wishes he could explain it all to her, why it's best that he leaves now, and how he's sorry, and how sometimes, also, he's not - but her mother is looking at him with steeled eyes and Betty looks so sad and he doesn't have the time, the space, to say all the things he wants to tell her, has to settle for a repeat of, "It's okay," and hope that it's enough.

He trudges up the stares and through the main floor of the Cooper home, the sound of Betty yelling tearfully at her mother rising from the basement, echoing through the bones in his feet.

 

 

 

He grabs his jacket on the way out the door but cannot bring himself to put it on, and walks to his father’s truck with his beanie clutched roughly in one hand and the jacket held in the other, his steps heavy on the pavement despite the soft layer of snow.

 

 

 

tbc.


	3. them

_baby, let me be good to you, good to you_   
_let me show you how proud I am to be yours_   
_leave this dress a mess on the floor_   
_and still look good for you, good for you_

 

When an abrupt winter sunset has turned the town to shadows, they convene at Pop’s.

Betty’s hair is down around her shoulders, recently washed, not quite fully dry, the slightest bit of frizz at the ends. She orders a black coffee even though she hates the taste and cups her hands around the mug for warmth. 

Jughead arrives with his own hair in disarray, no beanie in sight. His shoulders are slightly hunched beneath a corduroy coat - the leather jacket, too, is conspicuously absent. He slides into the other side of the booth and looks at her and Betty feels her heart lurch. 

“I should’ve told you,” he says quietly. “I know that. I just feel so… cornered, sometimes. The Serpents - my dad sort of left me to them, and if I turn my back on that, I’m not sure what that leaves me with, besides Craig and Nancy, who want me to live some kind of life it just feels too late for, and - ”

With a white-knuckled grip on her mug, Betty says, “And me. You have me.” 

There is a light in his eyes that flickers away into darkness. “Betts.” 

“I won’t help you with Serpent business. But I’m here. I’m here for everything else.” A tight throat makes her next words squeak ever so slightly: “I love you, Jughead. I’ve known you since I was four, and now - ” There are not words for now, at least not words she’s found yet, so she says, with both simplicity and steadiness, “I don’t let things go so easily.”

She tries to read him, the little curl at the left corner of his mouth, the flare of his nostrils as he sighs, the twitch in his fingers against the edge of the table, and it’s difficult, difficult like attempting to read the Brontës when she was ten, but then a little bit of that light slips back into his blue eyes, turning them bright, and it’s easy, so easy, easy like their first kiss, like the weight of his hand on her shoulder. 

She slides her mug of coffee across the table until it sits in front of him. He looks at it, looks at her, and then thumbs his nose, offering her a smile that’s small but not at all uncertain before he picks up the mug and takes a drink and that smile, that smile and everything it contains - it’s enough to make her cry. 

 

 

He takes her back to the trailer. They have hours before her curfew, still, but it feels very late, like they’re the only ones awake in the silent town. As they turn into Sunnyside, he glances over at her; she’s looking back at him, and in the harsh yellow glare of the streetlight, he sees the glint of her faux-jade earrings. 

In his bedroom, she brushes her fingertips against the curling edges of the posters tacked to the walls by his younger self. She lays on his bed, head on his pillow, and he settles in next to her, wrapping his old plaid comforter around them. Betty turns to him, her breath warming up the cocoon he’s created, her eyelashes tickling his cheeks. Without an ounce of grace, the two of them work together to pull her sweater up and over her head. She’s wearing a camisole underneath; she loops the straps down off her arms and pushes the fabric down until it’s scrunched around her hips. Jughead shuffles his way down her body, his feet escaping into the room’s cool air, and presses a kiss over her heart. 

Betty’s fingers fist into his hair. He will never forget the way her chest rises with an intake of breath or the quiet syllable formed by her mouth: “Please.”

 

 

“He’s the best person I know,” Betty swears to her mother, seated at the dining table, perched on the edge of her chair. When she suspects that Alice wants to scoff, she adds, “I swear he is.” 

Alice touches the loose, looping bow at the neckline of her blouse. “Elizabeth, Jughead has had a hard life, and you have had a very privileged one. You’re too young, and you’re feeling too much, to understand how this will end.” 

“I understand completely,” Betty says, and maybe it’s childish, this stubbornness that she’s feeling, but she can’t help herself. “It can end happily, but it will never have the chance to if you keep insisting that it won’t. _Someone_ has to get a happy ending.” She looks away, her chin dipping downward. “I want it to be him.” 

In her peripheral vision, she sees Alice’s hand move, inching along the table toward her but stopping short of making contact. Her fingers curl slowly into a fist, which surprises Betty; it’s a movement she recognizes as a behavioural pattern of her own. 

There is a striking fragility to that clenched fist; there is something elegiac about Alice’s slow and quiet exhale, about the way she says, “I know.” 

 

 

Jughead takes Betty to jail. He can hardly wrap his head around it, even on the drive, the idea of his girlfriend, always so good, ever so sweet, amid solid walls and gritty roughness, but in the passenger seat of his father’s truck, she sits with her chin lifted and her hair in a bun and a navy blue t-shirt beneath her jacket, not a pastel shade in sight; she is her own kind of solidity, her own kind of grit, and some part of his mind keeps flashing to an image, a sensation, his back against a bed and Betty’s knees on either side of his own hips, and he is profoundly screwed up, he truly is, because he is going to visit his criminal father, and he should be apprehensive, or maybe even sad, but instead he is utterly distracted by the thought of the creamy skin beneath Betty’s steeled exterior. 

In the visiting room, she sits with him on one side of a cheap table, her legs crossed primly at the ankle. A single wisp of hair has escaped from her perfect bun, and Jughead’s heart is beating low in his stomach. 

FP’s half-smile morphs quickly into a half-frown at the sight of her. “What’re you doing bringing a nice girl like that here?” he asks gruffly, thumping a fist against Jughead’s back during their single permitted hug. 

“I wanted to come, Mr. Jones,” Betty says, teeth gleaming white in her polite smile. Her pretty voice sounds so wrong in this dingy room that he’s certain the family at the next table turns to stare. 

“That’s nice of you Betty, but - ”

“Tim gave me something for you,” Jughead interjects. “But I don’t want to give it to you. I don’t want to be your mule.” 

His father looks at him. His father looks at Betty. His father looks at him again, this time with something very strange in his expression, something almost pained. 

“Tell Tim to send Sweet Pea,” he says, and then leans so far back in his chair that the front legs lift off the floor. 

That expression of his, it’s one Jughead seems to remember from long ago, from disappointing Christmas mornings, from forgotten student-teacher conferences. “So you fucked right up and fell in love, huh?” FP says, and there is a hint of mirth in his voice, an encouragement to smile, but were it not for Betty’s pinky finger just barely brushing up against the side of his thigh, Jughead feels as though right here, among these stifling walls, among all this regret, he could dissolve into uncontrollable sobs. 

 

 

They spend much of their time not on the north side of town nor on the south, but down near the river. It’s a fairly quiet place when ice still floats along its surface, almost a peaceful one; Betty hopes that Jason’s soul won’t be too bothered by their presence, hopes that even in his afterlife, he will remember the spiked gates of his family’s imposing home and know better than to blame the son for the sins of his father.

When she’s putting in extra hours on the school paper, Jughead is often with the Serpents, keeping up appearances; as she edits Ethel’s creative writing contribution, fiddling with line spacing, she can envision his expression: it seems to materialize over top of pixelated black words on a stark white background, the traces of tension in the lines and planes of his face, the projection of power in the way his arm stretches out casually along the bar to grip a bottle of beer resolutely, like his hold on that bottle, his fingers damp with its condensation, means something, says something, conveys an undeniable kind of belonging. Occasionally, she glances over at the desk that was once his, remembers the ferocious speed of his typing, the smiles he’d send her way sometimes, sitting on that very desk next to him and looking at their murder board; she orders herself not to be sad. 

Some nights they have to put on costumes and stage makeup and say all the right lines: while Betty wears a cheek-splitting smile and screams in support of the Bulldogs, shaking her hips and her pom-poms, Jughead has dinner with his foster parents and does his homework in his bedroom. She plays the part of the all-American blonde who supports her community, win or lose, and he steps into the role of the good foster kid, the one who tries, the one who will break out of the cycle he’s stuck in. She never voices the thought to Jughead, but as she jogs from the field to his truck, which is parked, engine still on, in a back corner of Riverdale High’s lot, that if you act one way for long enough, it ceases to be acting and starts to become you. It makes her love and hate her hometown in equal measure, for all the things it gives to her, to them, and for all it tries to take away. 

Parked by Sweetwater River, they crawl into the backseat together and cuddle up for warmth. They whisper even though they are alone and Jughead slides his hands up under her skirt, along the gooseflesh on her thighs. Some nights, Betty looks at that river and sees nothing but death, turns her head away and into Jughead’s shoulder; some nights she looks at it and sees nothing but hope, a softly winding path to elsewhere. 

 

 

_You got the right people on your side, eh, kid_ , Colt mutters near Jughead’s ear in the Whyte Wyrm’s parking lot, just old enough and broad-shouldered enough to be threatening even as he stalks away. Jughead watches him go with a carefully neutral expression and makes a point not to rush getting into his truck. 

The adrenaline fades away when he’s about halfway to his foster home, and he finds himself wondering exactly what Colt meant by _people_. On the fairly short list of people who care about his wellbeing, only one - his father - has any influence to exert upon the Serpents. Why not just mention FP by name?

The thought lingers with him throughout the night, disappears only after he falls asleep. 

 

 

Polly’s children are born on the sort of day that brushes violent breezes against the skin, that burns one’s eyes with the intensity of its sun. She goes into labour in the middle of the previous night, so Betty spends hours in the hospital in her pyjamas and a hoodie, her ponytail somewhat lopsided. 

When she first meets the babies, it is through glass, the two of them in little incubators behind it, stuck with wires that monitor their vitals, so, so impossibly small. 

For the first time in her life, _perfect_ doesn’t seem like such a dirty word, like such a demand, an unachievable goal. Her delicate, brand-new niece and nephew are the most perfect things she’s ever seen, and they are overwhelmingly, heart-wrenchingly beautiful, without even trying. 

She presses her hand carefully against the glass. _I will love you forever_ she thinks, her throat choked with emotion, and for an instant, that thought, that feeling - it’s enough. It’s enough to make her believe in perfect. To make her believe in everything. 

 

 

In the Coopers’ living room, Betty cradles her nephew in her arms, her face alight with adoration. The baby reaches up toward her and she hums his name and there is a stupid, terrible part of Jughead, a part that should remain repressed, that longs for a future of normalcy, that imagines rings on Betty’s finger and a two-storey home somewhere and a little child nestled in a comforting hold, warm and full and sleepy, unaware of all the bullshit the world has the offer, and he _wants_ that, wants it so hard that it’s a lump in his throat, wants _family_ , family of his own making, family in his control, family that does not question his loyalty or adopt faces of disappointed concern when he’s two minutes late for curfew, family that is not imposed upon him by his father’s mistakes or the state’s best intentions, family like what he used to have with Jellybean when she snuck into his bedroom during thunderstorms with giant eyes, family like Betty’s gaze on that baby, like she’d pluck the stars from the sky for him if she could. 

“Do you want to hold him, Juggie?” she asks. There are spot of purplish darkness beneath her eyes from being kept awake at night by two squalling infants. He cups her cheek in his hand and runs his thumb along that space adjacent to her cheekbone, that thin and tender skin. 

“You’ll - ” His voice comes out low and rough; he clears his throat. “You’ll have to show me how.” 

She puts the baby in his arms, doling out soft instructions, and when she perches her chin on his shoulder to look down at her nephew’s face, something inside Jughead goes so pliant he feels as though he could melt. 

Betty puts her hand against the back of his neck, her thumb rubbing gently over his skin, like she knows what he’s feeling, like she understands, and Jughead feels so desperate all of a sudden, painfully desperate, to find the roadmap that will lead them to another moment just like this one.

 

 

Starting at her collarbone, Betty undoes every single button on her dress, right to its hem. 

It is short-sleeved and flowy, covered in a faintly floral pattern. Kevin convinced her to buy it before she went to L.A. for her internship, but she never wore it, because she’s never been a seventies-style flower child kind of girl, always much more comfortable in her fifties-inspired sweaters, pearly buttons of her cardigan neatly done up. 

Tonight, though, in Jughead’s father’s trailer, a single lamp supplying a warm burst of light on the other side of the room, Betty does not feel like her usual pressed-collar, simple-skirt self, and she is thankful for this dress, for every one of its buttons, for the way Jughead’s eyes follow the movement of her fingers, unblinking. She’s already taken off her boots and tights and when she’s unbuttoned the very last button, she uses her hands, which are just barely trembling, to pull the dress open and off her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. 

Jughead gets up from where he’s sitting on the edge of his old bed and walks toward her, each step seemingly in slow motion. His hands extend toward her bare waist, hover upward toward her chest, where her exposed nipples are tightening, move downward to the curves of her hips, where if he touches her, he will encounter only skin, not a single inch of fabric, but ultimately lifts his hands again and puts them on her cheeks, his skin so warm it makes her sigh. 

“Betts,” he says, and swallows audibly. 

She covers his hands with her own, fits each of her fingers between each of his. She imagines that her skin is cool against his and she wants him to change that, wants him to turn her body to fire. She is in love with him, with this boy and his warm hands and his warm heart. She isn’t afraid. 

“I’m ready,” she whispers, and when his fingers dig into her cheeks almost painfully, she doesn’t wince but understands; if she could, she’d hold him that fast, that hard, forever. 

 

 

When the snow is almost finished melting, Jughead takes Betty to a movie. It’s a moment that feels quite universal, like he’s living in a quintessential piece of Americana, two overpriced tickets to the latest popular flick burning a hole in his pocket, the sole of one scuffed-up boot propped against the Bijou’s brick exterior as he leans his upper body against it, watching the activity of the town as he waits for his girlfriend’s mother to drop her off because Betty’s parents are still hesitant to let her borrow the car. 

She seems to spring out of Alice’s sensible sedan and doesn’t look back as she swings the door shut. She is so beautiful, cardigan wrapped snugly around her body to keep out the crisp breeze, mouth enticing under baby-pink lipstick, eyes green as the buds that are slowly breaking through once-frozen ground. 

There is laughter in her eyes, too, and he hears it in the melody of her voice as well when she teases, “Did you wear that just for me?” 

He reaches up self-consciously to touch his beanie. “I thought you might like it,” he says. He does not add _if things were like they were before_ , but he trusts she’ll understand the implication. 

“I do.” Her mother gone, now, she slips thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans. “I like you with it. And I like you without it.” 

“Sounds like you find me pretty ease to like, Betty Cooper,” he says, letting one eyebrow arch slightly. 

“On the contrary, Jughead Jones.” She reaches up and plucks the beanie off his head and then sets it on hers instead, pulling it down firmly so that it covers the tips of her ears. “I find you pretty easy to love.”

Unable to resist, he takes her chin in his hand and plants a kiss on her mouth. He can feel her smile against his lips, and her hands clutch at the front of his flannel shirt. “I love you, too,” he murmurs, and he swallows the sweetness of her laughter, his other hand pressing into the small of her back, holding her close, and he has the startling sensation that things might be alright. 

Between the cracks in the sidewalk, a single buttercup blooms. 

 

 

fin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
